Sometimes there's architecture IN a film, and sometimes architecture is LIKE a film. But sometimes the architecture IS the film: When it rises above just being a thing to see, and becomes a MECHANISM for a WAY of SEEING, that is the Architecture OF Film

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

ARCHITECTURE OF THE CONVERSATIONThe Conversation works with sound as montage does to sight-LAYERING:
layering of sound fragments repeated over and over in discontinuous
replays until we finally put it together in our heads. but listen up for
trick ending- the only failure. great ending: layers of ambient and
scenographic musicsVisual Abetting: Layers of reflections in phone-booth and the trolley window, its lights stopping and starting;TRANSPARENCY: Filtering through obstacles in space, (the park,) to apprehend an ultimate composition, (the conversation.)Visual
Abetting: Blue screen hanging in studio, scrim on interior corporate
office windows, the view to the murder through textured glass, the
Francis Bacon smear of the view to the body through the bloody plastic
shower curtain; even his rubber raincoat helps render him more
vulnerable for its foggy flimsy see-throughness, whipping around in the
wind as he traipses back to the envelope he’s almost brave enough to
leave thrown away.MULTIPLE POINTS OF VIEW: The conversation,
recorded from different angles, listened to with different agendas and
understood by different predispositions;Visual abetting: the
backward-forward view through the van window provides a cheap and easy
peephole for amateurs; the easy use he puts to the surveillance camera
at the convention; the view to his cell-among-others on the terrace of
the hotel;Dig the studio he works in - before “live-work” lofts;Dig
the style: Late High Modern, high corporate kingdom (Embarcadero
center), austere and menacing slickness of upper offices. Hard edged
concrete reception desk at grade level as faceless as the Polaroid
guards with neckties.The sound technician on the movie has said the
sound he used to indicate unclear parts of the recording is entirely
made up and not related to any real effect of recording.I’ve tried
to figure out what if any significance there is to it being the
particular scene of the Flintstones that he wakes up to in the hotel. My
only and unsatisfactory guess is that Barney being in drag might echo
the dissemblance elsewhere. okay it doesn’t mean anything. Better than
this is how the camera contemplates the silent bucolic scenarioin the wallpaper as it fails to disclose or suggest the cataclysm it so gently masksScary moment: great pause by Hackman when phone rings (see his listening, disbelieving shadow in the other room.)